fill the void

Posts from September 2008

RssBucket: Yet Another RSS Reader

I started programming in Objective-C and Cocoa in April. To familiarize myself with the language and framework, I wrote an RSS reader, and I had planned to throw that code away as soon as I felt comfortable building a real application. Of course, then I thought it would be fun to release that reader to [...]


Atomic Transactions

I went to the gas station yesterday to fill up my car. It was the normal routine until I squeezed the pump handle and nothing happened. I tried it again, took the pump out, put it back in, squeezed. Nothing. After half a minute of this, the machine beeped and asked if I’d like my [...]


Cocoa Tutorial: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow with NSDate

One common need is to make dates within the last week more readable, like using “Today” instead of “September 13″. Apple Mail and NetNewsWire both do this. When using Cocoa Bindings, the easiest path to this is through an NSValueTransformer. I initially tried to use NSCalendarDate (following this example), but apparently Apple might deprecate that [...]


Cocoa Tutorial: iTunes Link Arrows

iTunes has small horizontal arrow icons integrated into many interfaces, in Music, Podcasts, and the Store. They’re in other applications too, such as Instruments and Delicious Library. The HIG briefly touches on these arrows but doesn’t name them, so I call them link arrows, if only to distinguish them from arrow keys. I did a [...]


Cocoa Tutorial: Source List Badges

Source lists have become a standard user interface element at this point in the Mac environment. Apple’s Mail, iCal, iTunes, and iPhoto use them, along with many third-party applications including Delicious Monster’s Delicious Library and Panic’s Coda. They’re easily created using an NSTableView or NSOutlineView and changing the selectionHighlightStyle (highlight in Interface Builder) to “Source [...]